THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 9-17-06: CONSUMED; Free Ride

By Rob Walker

Published: September 17, 2006

Wonder Bread

The proliferation of product and brand placement in movies and television programming has become so extreme that it's barely noted anymore. An exception to this is the attention focused on the prominent inclusion of the Wonder Bread logo in the recent Will Ferrell vehicle ''Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.'' Given that the comedy is set in the world of Nascar racing, where every car and every driver moves about in a branded sheath, it was inevitable that nearly every frame of the film would be cluttered with logos. What got people interested in Wonder's inclusion is that the brand didn't pay for it. Shortly after the film opened, a marketing consultancy called Joyce Julius & Associates issued a press release saying that ''the Wonder Bread logo appeared clear and in focus for 11 minutes 32 seconds (11:32), while the brand was also mentioned on two occasions by the actors,'' and that, it asserted, added up to media exposure worth $4.3 million. Another observer guessed that buying this level of exposure might have cost as much as $100 million.

That seems on the high side, but it's no surprise that Wonder's corporate parent, Interstate Bakeries, was happy to sign off on Wonder's presence in the film, on a variety of collateral Ricky Bobby products (hats, toy cars, etc.), ads for the film and even Sprint ads featuring the Ricky Bobby character. The company's chief marketing officer, Rich Seban, says that Ferrell himself wrote Wonder into the script because ''it's one of his favorites.'' While Seban says that it will take a while to gauge any actual impact on sales, Wonder's star turn ''was great for the brand in terms of contemporizing it with people, having fun, showing that we're not so serious about ourselves.''

In real life, Wonder is in no position to spend millions sponsoring a nonfictitious Nascar driver: Interstate Bakeries has been operating under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for two years, slogging through a reorganization process that has involved shutting down a number of its bakeries. Interstate owns several other brands that are almost as iconic as Wonder -- notably the Hostess Twinkie. Brand icons, perhaps, just aren't what they used to be.

Wonder Bread dates to the 1920's, and as James B. Twitchell, the advertising scholar, recounted in his book ''Lead Us Into Temptation,'' it was a hit at the 1939 World's Fair: ''This was the bread for the new world.'' For years, everything about it was exciting and optimistic, from the identical slices to the newfangled cellophane packaging to the chemical additives that the brand's advertising agency repositioned as stuff that ''helps build strong bodies 12 ways.'' (''The 12 ways were never explained,'' Twitchell notes, recounting the company's run-ins with the Federal Trade Commission over its ad claims.)

Wonder remains the top-selling white bread, but in a time when the Department of Agriculture says that we should eat more whole grains and even Wal-Mart is championing organics, nobody views white bread as a thrilling product of the future. So it seems likely that Ferrell's choice of Wonder as his feckless driver's sponsor had less to do with his bread-consumption habits than with the fact that he makes his living by being funny. Ricky Bobby is a self-involved simpleton who gives a paid shout-out to Powerade while saying grace. Wonder Bread is funny.

Still, it's not quite right to say that Wonder is being used solely as a punch line. While the brand has recently introduced new variations that incorporate whole grains to help address ''where consumers are headed,'' Seban says, lots of people still like white bread, even if they no longer see it as a particularly health-conscious choice. (One of the new subbrands is actually called Wonder White Bread Fans 100% Whole Grain.) Perhaps the most useful aspect of the ''Talladega Nights'' placement for the Wonder brand is that it coincides with stepped-up efforts to license the logo for use on T-shirts and the like. And from its name to its beautiful colored-dot logo (supposedly inspired by a 1920's balloon festival), Wonder has an innocence about it, an almost sweet faith in scientific progress, that may be easy to snicker at but is even easier to be nostalgic for. Which is why, as much as the brand has borrowed exposure from the film, it also lent a subtle set of meanings that only an old-school brand icon possesses.